As a novelist she wrote bestsellers, as an MP she grilled the Murdochs and as a blogger she is reinventing feminism. Saska Graville meets the unstoppable Louise Mensch at her new home in New York.

It takes a person of considerable clout to force Louise Mensch to change her plans. This is the woman who in 2011, as the Conservative MP for Corby, left the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s questioning of James Murdoch 45 minutes early, because she had to pick up her children from school.

But where a Murdoch didn’t cut it, a primary school teacher does. As I arrive at Mensch’s Upper West Side Manhattan home, she is in the midst of rearranging her afternoon, due to a school email that’s thrown her timetable into disarray. What she thought was a voluntary event, apparently isn’t. ‘'The teacher says, "“I look forward to seeing you later",' she laughs, eyebrows raised, as she scrambles to diary juggle. 'I thought it was optional, it's clearly not.'

When a teacher says jump, even the toughest among us do what we're told. With an afternoon that includes the Red shoot and interview, and now a summons to school, it's clear that Mensch packs a lot into a day. Her CV already lists 14 bestselling novels, two years as an MP, and now Manhattan-based political commentator, blogger and TV documentary maker. She does things in a hurry. Which makes her a perfect judge for this year's Red’s Women of the Year Awards. Career, achievements, ambition, work/life priorities; the Awards are right up her street.

PHOTOSHOP v SURGERY

But first, she has one strict rule. 'You will have to use the photos of me unPhotoshopped,' she tells me. A refreshing request in a world where celebrity agents often ask for Photoshop approval. 'I've been against it on Unfashionista [her blog] for body image,' she says, of the anti-Photoshopping stance she's taken. 'I cannot be digitally slimmed or smoothed.'

So what you see here is a totally unretouched 42-year-old mother of three. Pretty impressive, right? Except that she's also a surgically tweaked mother of three. Mensch has been candid about the cosmetic procedure that she had on her lower face, telling Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman that, 'I had a little tightening done in my face. I like the way I look, I prefer to keep it that way.' No to Photoshopping, yes to surgery, isn't there a contradiction in there somewhere? 'Yes, but I'm not trying to use my own personal beauty decisions as advice for other women,' she says. 'The day I get up there and do a Liz Jones style piece for the Daily Mail and say, "Here's me pre- and post-facelift, wow, it's so great, go and get one done", then you can say I'm setting an example. But I'm just doing something to my own self that I think is going to be good for me in my forties.'

And there you have Louise Mensch in a nutshell. Inspiring to some, infuriating to others, sometimes a little bit of both at the same time. She's refreshingly outspoken, forthright, intelligent, unflappable and very much her own woman. I'm looking forward to Red’s Women judging day already.

LIVING IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

How Mensch came to be ensconced in a rather splendid New York brownstone is a well-reported story. For those of you who missed the press furore, she resigned as an MP in 2012, mid-way through her Parliamentary term and just two years into the job, in order to move to New York, where her second husband lives. Her decision was greeted with howls of disapproval. She was, it was cried, letting down working mothers everywhere, by (allegedly) quitting to spend more time with her three young children from her first marriage, now six, eight and 10. (She refuses to let more details about them into the public domain.)

The reasons were, she says, more complicated than that, involving, primarily, the logistics of what age it was reasonable to take her children out of school and move them to America, where her first husband, Anthony LoCicero, also lives. 'Because of my childrens' ages and being told we couldn't move them in 2015 [when her political term would have been up], essentially we [Mensch and her second husband] were looking at a 13-year separation,' she says of her decision to resign while the school-timings window was open. As for the claims that she let the sisterhood down? 'People like the same old debate about work/life balance – which, by the way, is only ever asked about women,' she says. 'When David Miliband stepped down mid-term, to take a job in New York, we didn't have a bunch of articles about his work/life balance. We had a political argument about how he didn't want to work with his brother.'

Ah, but David Miliband didn't have a transatlantic love story to spice up the newspaper reports of his move. Mensch does – and then some. Her husband of two years is Peter Mensch, a big-time heavy metal band manager (Def Leppard, AC/DC to name but two), who first met his now-wife in 1990 when she was an Oxford undergraduate, and president of the Rock Society. He spoke, at her invitation, at a debate on censorship in the music business. To hear her describe the passion she felt for him – and how she never quite gave up on her lovestruck dream,– is to truly believe in fairy-tale endings.

THE ULTIMATE LOVE STORY

'I met the guy, I fell head over heels in love,' she says. 'But we couldn't be together. He was married. I wasn't married. But I had to give up on this fantasy, and so I wrote a fictional book and worked it all out in my head.' That book, Career Girls, written by the then Louise Bagshawen in 1995, tells of a ‘willowy, blonde’ Oxford graduate and her passion for an older music mogul. Optimistically on the part of the author, he leaves his wife for her heroine. 'It was kind of obsessive, I'm built that way,' admits Mensch. 'Apparently it's called limerance – a psychological term for a type of infatuation. I told myself at the time, you have got to get over this guy, he's a rock manager, he's not a real person. It had to be infatuation. It was my One Direction stage, which I'd grow out of.'

But of course, that, dear reader, was not the end of the story. Mensch went off, triumphed in her writing career and got married, but one marriage breakdown and three children later, she decided to get back in touch with the object of her infatuation.

'I said to myself, I am just going to see if he's happy,' she says. 'As soon as I saw him, the years fell away. I said to him, "I'’m getting a divorce," and he said, "So am I".'

How does the man himself remember the first encounter with his future wife? 'She was really bright, incredibly well-spoken and obsessed with heavy metal and the Union,' Peter Mensch tells me, in an email from New York. And as for all those years later? 'She was clearly more self-possessed, still well-spoken, less obsessed by music in that current music had moved on (!) while Louise still quoted Def Leppard lyrics (ha), but clearly on a mission in politics. And adding in her nearly 20-year declaration of love for me. I was stunned.' No wonder he describes her as a ‘force of nature’, adding, 'When she is on a mission (any mission), you cannot slow her down or stop her until either she achieves her goal or the storm peters out.'

Long live limerance, I say. We could all do with a little bit of the Menschs' passion in our lives. Although I do draw the line at framing a picture of my beloved putting on his socks. 'I had this made so that I could have it on my desk,' says Mensch, showing me a framed montage of photos of her husband, including one that is most definitely of him sitting on the edge of a bed, putting on his shoes and socks. 'That was the day he went to ask my dad for my hand in marriage,' says his visibly emotional wife. 'I’'m going to start crying.' Blimey, the man who made her think, 'What a babe!' over 20 years ago has clearly still got it.

TABLOID FODDER

Maybe it's her mix of head-girl-like forthrightness and a tendency to sometimes overshare (she tells me that she and her husband ‘quarrel a little bit all the time, but then we’'ll go to bed and make passionate love'), that makes Mensch such catnip to the tabloids. 'I’'ve always been reasonably controversial because I'm very opinionated,' she admits. 'When I was an MP, I was called pushy, publicity-seeking, ambitious…. These are all negatives. Nobody ever calls Boris Johnson publicity-seeking, because he's a guy.' She's right about that. 'Nick Clegg can give an interview to GQ and say that he's had 30 sexual partners [as Clegg did in 2010], but I wonder what it would be like if I, in my interview with GQ [in 2012], had started discussing my sex life? Would you hear the end of it? No, you wouldn't. But because Nick Clegg does it, he's a bloke, it's perfectly alright. ' Again, I reckon she has a point.

But don't for a minute think that Mensch is on some sort of them and us, men versus women campaign. Quite the opposite. The key to equality, she thinks, is to stop labelling men as the bad guys. 'We've got a big problem today in the feminist movement,' she says. 'Although most women identify with things that we would call feminist goals – equal pay for equal work and the rest of it – they don't self-identify as feminist. The label is really bad. If we want to get feminism back into a movement that the mass of women support, it's got to stop being so anti-men.'

Hence her blog Unfashionista champions what Mensch calls ‘pro-men feminism’. 'I will argue forever that wanting to look good for your partner is nothing to do with submission, but to do with love and focusing on the other person. It's not anti-feminist to give a damn what your man thinks of you.

'It's also not anti-feminist,' says Mensch, to be a stay-at-home mum. Some women, she thinks, 'feel they're being judged by a group of feminists if they would prefer, and have the means, to stay home with their children, or take a career break. They feel they're viewed as not feminist enough. A woman has every right to be [Facebook CEO] Sheryl Sandberg, but if she also wants to stay home and raise three kids, that's just as important.

'My feminism respects a woman’'s choice. Be ambitious, and do it on your own terms.'

New York life suits Mensch. She looks glowing, fit and undeniably content. 'It's relaxed me,' she says of her new home town. 'I miss Parliament but at the same time, I'm not under that colossal stress that all MPs are under.' She seems to have found her psychological happy place. 'America celebrates ambition in men and women, it likes chutzpah,' she says. '[British] feminism too often attacks women who are successful, for propping up the capitalist patriarchy, etc. Well, you know, prop it up. We need more Martha Lane Foxes.'

As for her chutzpah, it's doing just fine. Take the wide-ranging editorial agenda of Unfashionista, for a start: 'A bit of feminism and progressive politics, a bit of motivational stuff, lots of fitness and some fashion targeted at girls like me, who have no style of their own.' Sounds like a full-time job in itself. Add to that documentary-making for Sky Arts (with her heavy metal hero AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson), her on going novel-writing (next up, Beauty, ‘a sort of take-off of Estée Lauder’), her political commentary in TheSun and TV appearances, and you'd be forgiven for thinking Mensch never left Britain at all.

'It's almost the best of all possible worlds,' she says of her new life. She gets to be opinionated on our side of the Atlantic, whilst the school mums on her side have no idea who she is. 'Nobody knows who I am, it's brilliant,' she says. 'I feel like a very small fish in an enormous pond.'

So, girl meets boy. Girl tries to forget boy. Girl divorces, boy divorces. Girl moves to New York for boy and they live happily ever after. It's even better than Mensch's own stories.

'I don't want everybody to hate me, but sometimes I do feel like I'm living one of my own books,' she admits. 'The standard of victory for me is that a woman has choices and she can make those choices and not be judged for them.'

She may have had to move to New York to escape the judgments, but I'd say Louise Mensch's victory is won.

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Louise Mensch

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15% Off Offer at The Balmoral, Edinburgh

The Balmoral is a luxurious hotel in the heart of Edinburgh, featuring stylish interiors and a fantastic Michelin-starred restaurant. From now until 8th September, they're offering a 15% discount on a three-night stay in a King Room, with rates starting at £186. So come August when the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in full swing, you can take advantage of this opportunity of a late summer break in the buzzing Scottish capital.

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